I want to find an ecommerce solution for my little shop. My friend tells me that Prestashop is very easy to use and develop modules for, but some say Magento is better. Can anybody tell me which is better for developing modules and why? Thank you.

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I've tried both, and I find Magento more polished, albeit more complicated as well. Depending on what you need to get done, it might be overkill. If it is just a small project, you may want to stick with Prestashop.
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JonSep 1 '09 at 18:25

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In my experience, Magento is an awful mess of nested dirs and files, however, after a steep learning curve, it would probably offer more functionality. I have never used Prestashop. Magento does allow you to create your own modules though, with any elements you desire. Check out the first answer [here][1]. [1]: stackoverflow.com/questions/766974/…
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Nona UrbizSep 1 '09 at 18:26

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Having looked under the covers of both of these beasts I can't say that I actually like either of them as they're both rather ugly when you pop the bonnet and something like OpenCart is actually a much nice and easier to work with solution. However, from a feature perspective OpenCart is nowhere near either Magento or PrestaShop and unlike PrestaShop it doesn't have a team of developers behind it. However having said that it is much easier to understand and modify for anyone with a basic knowledge of OO PHP. It is much better structured. PrestaShop is actually a bit ugly under the covers and CSCart (which is an open source, but not free alternative) may also be a viable solution as it only costs like $300 so not that much. I'd have to say I'd personally go for either PrestaShop or CSCart as they do have a lot more features than OpenCart and at the same time also don't cost anywhere near Magento to setup and run. Magento is an absolute nightmare if you're looking to change anything even if you really know what you're doing... Too many layers.

Another cart I would suggest to anyone who isn't fussed about technology is nopCommerce. It's a ASP.NET based shopping cart and it's very well architected and full of features. It is also very easy to modify for anyone with ASP.NET experience.

I share the same concern, but after working with nopCommerce I found a great true opensource e-commerce platform that works for smaller as well as mid-scale e-commerce sites. Compared to Magento or Prestashop, its community is very active and its developer fixes bugs on top priority. The major reason to advocate nopCommerce is its well thought modular architecture which is easy to extend using additional modules. Compared to Magento and Prestashop, its very easy to customize it. And it has almost all the features that you may need which are very similar to what you get with Magento.
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KrunalJul 2 '13 at 14:39

I haven't used Prestashop but I have recently deployed a Magento store. As others have said, I wouldn't suggest it for small, simple stores. Also, if you are on an economy server, you're likely to have sluggish page loads.

The good news is that (after a steep learning curve), it's incredibly flexible and powerful. I personally think the templating system is great.

I fully agree with the opinion that MAGENTO is to "heavy" and consumes too much CPU and memory. If you have your own dedicated server you may try magento. But if you can affort shared hosting only use lighweight PRESTASHOP. Much shopperd do not need complicated functionalities provided by MAGENTO and therefore don't like it. More doesn't always mean better - sometimes simpler means better. Moreover there is large set of PRESTASHOP extensions available free and commercial ones. so every shop owner may choose what he needs and wants. Every potential market gap is filled imediatelly e.g. if somebody noticed there is no fast checkout option in the guest mode buying. This kind of extension appears immediately on the market - e.g. see http://zoosshop.com This mode really works. You will get the store that you need exactly.

I am not a programmer, so I am confined to noob-like needs. At first I tried Magento, and found it to be difficult. It also "crashed" (not sure what word to use) a couple times, the last time beyond something I could figure out. I began to wonder if the entire thing was created just to get me to get in so deep that I'd need pro support to fix it when in a pinch.

So as I searched the internet looking for a decent alternative, I stumbled upon PrestaShop. I gave it a shot, since my Magento site was still RIP. Found it to be much easier to use, and I had a shop up and running (STILL up and running) in a day.

So I'm not sure what it all means, but hands down I liked PrestaShop better. I did like the options to create multiple shopping experiences within Magento, but I figure I can just use multiple PrestaShop installs to accomplish the same thing. Either way I'd have to customize 'em, anyway.

Magento is more polished, but also a beast to modify, in my experience. After using Magento for a few shops, we switched to Prestashop and are much happier. It took a bit more customization up front (French-based development left some quirks in the address forms, for example), but it is much, much simpler to wrap your brain around and to develop custom modules.

Magento is S L O W. It has a very specific list of server requirements that have to be met, and even then it may not work 100%.

Also, using Magento on a shared hosting environment can be VERY insecure as Magento likes to have things writable on the file system. If your hosting company does not have iron clad security another user on that system can make changes in those writeable areas.

As far as code quality, I'd say it's pretty good. It's also more complicated than it needs to be. They completely ignored the K.I.S.S. principle (Keep It Simple, Silly).

To sum up, Magento is good if you are interested in an expensive server and complex development. If you want straight forward, it's not for you.

Magento is a very complex solution for large shops that require good hardware base to handle more than 500 products. Although even though there is a lot of resources to start with Magento I have personally found out that building themes is really easy once you find your way around few annoying things like XML layout dependencies (there is barely anything documented on XML, which is the base for making good themes for Magento) and objects in PHP (some functions and data is not accessible from certain parts of the template just because).

I'm very comfortable with working and writing my own apps in OO PHP but stuff that Magento pulls off sometimes is really annoying. Also directory structure and the way themes are being handled is awkward...

On the other hand, Prestashop is fast (after few tweaks), but still requires some work in the back-end. I am developing a lot of back-end modules to help people get the most out of this system as it's worth it. Plus the community is growing and developers are fixing everything they can.

One more thing: writing both, back-end and front-end modules for Prestashop is incredibly easy, plus using SMARTY for tempaltes is a good choice.

Edit: Magento is very easy to break during or after deployment (especially between localhost and a hosted space) and maintenance in SVN might be a pain for inexperienced devs.

Magento is a very complete solution in order to have a big shop, with more than 500 products.
But, for newbies, it's very difficult to load and modify it.
Today, I have a website on magento with more than 20,000 products, and we still have issues.
It very difficult to configure it, and without a nice optimization, you will have very slowly website.
I advise you less than 300 products to use prestashop.

Like you, i am NOT a programmer but a store owner. So i hope my view point helps you, i have used both Prestashop and Magento.

Magento i didnt like, boatware!
Prestashop is good, pretty templates but the good modules are not free and to get an online shop with the features you need can end up costing 1000s

I also use Zen Cart, while it has the worlds ugliest standard template, if your css knowledge is average you can make it look pretty much like anything you want. It has more features built in than the Magento £11k pa has and all modules on te site are free.
Also a better community too as the forums are open source focused

Prestashop is your best bet. The only problem with prestashop is that it uses smarty template engine and rather than write clean php wihtout the need of loops etc in smarty they have made it a very great deal of effort for the average person to theme.

I will stand behind prestashop 100 percent if they get rid of smarty and implement a simpler templating system such as a main html file with includes that you can just embed php template tags into.

It's now getting to the point that PrestaShop has a lot more features than the free version of Magento, so I would if you want to spend thousands a year to get the best, get Magento. If you want a great community which releases all sorts of modules and themes for free (along with a bunch of great paid ones), PrestaShop is the way to go.

One big thing that I want to do is give people vouchers/coupons, so if I meet them or sell them something, they can use the coupon on another purchase. It's built into PrestaShop, but with Magento you need to give them a lot of money in order to use that feature. Albeit you get a lot of features for a lot of money, but for a lot of small businesses, it is a lot cheaper to use PrestaShop and pay professionals to work on it and pay for some modules than shell out a lot of money every single year to Magento.

Oh yeah, when you pay for Magento, you are only getting a one-year license. I was really into Magento until I found this out, now I don't give a damn about the company or it's faux open-source project that they have swept underneath the carpet.